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Dónal Houston

Atlantropa: The Extraordinary Plan to Dam the Mediterranean


View of North Coast of Africa across the Strait of Gibraltar from the Rock of Gibraltar Source: Nicklas n.d

Introduction

The 1920s are commonly known for being a time of economic and social prosperity in the west, propelled by wartime recovery and an economic boom. However, beneath this façade, instability and insecurity were rife. Since the first World War, over-population, unemployment, and lack of natural resources became a major problem in Europe (Vidal 2014), and difficulties with peace agreements, reparations and the US policy of non-interventionism created tension among nations which were still recovering from war.


This was exacerbated by the Great Depression which caused unemployment to rise drastically in almost every country (Temin 2016). On top of this, extreme political ideologies began to rise in many countries, most notably Germany and Italy, established on lebensraum and expansion. These grew throughout the 1920s and 30s until a breaking point was reached in World War 2.

These problems affected Europe for decades spanning two world wars and many plans were proposed to allow stability to return to Europe. Most of them have been lost to the past as nothing more than plans, proposed as a desperate way to solve a variety of complex challenges at once. One of these plans was the Atlantropa Project.


The Plan

Atlantropa was an idea put forward by German architect Herman Sörgel as a solution to many of the problems which had been plaguing Europe and a more peaceful alternative to lebensraum. The plan was to create a Eurafrican supercontinent by damming the Mediterranean to lower sea levels and, as a result, create a land bridge which would connect the two continents.


It was based around the fact that the Mediterranean Sea is naturally evaporative and so blocking its inputs would cause sea levels to drop significantly, by up to 200m in some parts (Mauch 2012). As shown in Figure 1, a major dam would be built across the strait of Gibraltar to limit input from the Atlantic Ocean. A secondary dam at Sicily would help to lower sea level in the eastern Mediterranean, and various smaller dams would control inputs, such as the Nile and Black Sea.


The new land created by the lowering of sea levels would create vast amounts of land, allowing for it to be territorialized, solving the over-population problem. The new land would also create a land bridge between Europe and Africa providing access to even more land and more resources than was available in Europe.



Figure 1: Exhibition Poster (1932) of the Atlantropa Project. Source: Mauch 2012



However, the most significant value of the project would be the hydroelectric power created by the dams. Hydroelectricity was a fairly new concept at the time, with the first hydroelectric power plant beginning operation on the Fox River, Wisconsin, in 1882 (Nunez 2019). Sörgel saw hydroelectricity as an important resource and the only way to move away from fossil fuels. He believed that the hydroelectric power created from this colossal dam would be “potentially inexhaustible” (Lehmann 2016) and enough to provide power for the entirety of the new continent (Vidal 2014). Other hydroelectric dams on the Sea of Marmara and Congo River would add to the electricity production. This would have been of monumental value to all of Europe and Africa, value which could not be underestimated and would have altered the European landscape considerably.


The final addition to the plan came in the late 1930s. Sörgel developed plans for the irrigation of the Sahara and parts of Africa through desalination and redirection of Mediterranean water to areas of the Sahara, allowing for better living conditions and a more moderate climate (Gall 2001) in some of the most inhabitable areas of the continent. Sörgel also planned for planned for the construction of two dams in the Congo Basin, creating a 900,000km² freshwater lake which would be connected to Lake Chad (Vidal 2014) which would improve the climate of this large area and create another source of hydroelectric power for the continent, improving the quality of life for the people.


As the interwar period passed and WW2 raged on, the likeliness of the Atlantropa Project being taken on slowly declined. There had been some support for the project in Sörgel’s native Germany, however it was ridiculed by Hitler’s Nazi regime in the 1930s for not following the strategy of Eurasian expansion (Fourtané 2018), so the support from pockets of the population did not go very far. Sörgel continued to promote his project for years after, publishing numerous papers on the topic, until his death in 1952.


Is Atlantropa still possible?

Since Sörgel’s death, the Atlantropa Project has been seen as nothing more than an outlandish solution to problems since forgotten. However, the question of “What if?” lives on. Could this idea have evolved into something much more realistic? And if so, what would the project have looked like in actuality?


The first problem to tackle is how the project would have gained enough support to even be considered amongst the countries of Europe at the time. Although the plan had a small amount of support in Germany, it was not entertained in the countries which had Mediterranean coasts, such as Spain and Italy. Coastal cities such as Genoa and Barcelona would have found themselves much further inland, with Venice in particular finding itself hundreds of miles from the coast due to the drastic lowering of the Adriatic. There has been some suggestion that if WW2 had gone another way, and a German occupation of western Europe had occurred, that the project would be much more likely to be undertaken due to the dictatorial rule of the Mediterranean countries, however, as discussed previously, Sörgel’s plan was not particularly popular amongst the Nazi regime and it is not likely to have been looked into. Therefore, the support necessary for the project to go ahead would be very difficult to gather.


There is also an insurmountable problem around the construction of a dam across the Strait of Gibraltar. The Strait of Gibraltar is about 13km wide, which is already an extremely long distance to dam, however Sörgel did not want to construct the dam at the narrowest point of the strait, but rather 30km inside the Mediterranean. This dam would have had to be 300m high and 2.5km thick and it has been suggested that there is not enough concrete in the world to complete this project (Jacobs 2010). This alone makes the project unfeasible, even without considering the other smaller dams and canals which would be needed to lower sea levels by a considerable amount. This would also come with a very high cost, one which the value of the project would not justify, either in the 1920s or today.



Figure 2: Author’s own screenshot from: Scott T (2016), “The Bizarre Plan to drain the Mediterranean: Atlantropa”.

Figure 2 shows theoretical dam location and length according to Sörgel’s plans.


One of the major consequences of the project would have been its effect on climate. With an average depth of 1500m (Lionello et al. 2012), the new land created on the Mediterranean Basin would be much lower than the existing land and would potentially be one of the hottest places on earth as a result of the high air pressure and a smaller body of water to moderate the climate. This would also have a knock-on effect on the climates of the rest of Europe and Northern Africa.


The water that previously filled the Mediterranean would also have to go somewhere else and it is estimated that global sea levels would rise by 1.35m as a result of draining the Mediterranean into the oceans (Marshall 2015). This would have catastrophic impacts on the low lying areas and, once again, makes the project impossible without even considering any of the other problems that it faces.


The human aspect of the project must also be considered when asking about feasibility. Sörgel’s idea was founded on a colonial world system (Temin 2016) with the project being more of an assimilation of the African continent by European powers rather than a merging. The new land and resources would have been solely available for the European countries (Vidal 2015) and the parts of the project which were focused on Africa were aimed at European settlers by making the land and climate more suited to them, meaning natives would not only not be able to avail of the newly irrigated land and energy, but would have been forced out of the area for the new European settlers.


Therefore, if Sörgel had gained the support needed and the plans went ahead, the project could have had some significantly negative impacts on the people and culture of Africa.

As these colonial ideas faded, however, the other problems came to the forefront and new ideas for tackling issues of drought and irrigation emerged which were less expensive and more effective, making the potential that Atlantropa once had completely obsolete.


Conclusion

In conclusion, the Atlantropa Project, at least in the state that was proposed by Sörgel, is not possible to successfully complete and if it were possible, there would have been significant consequences which would have altered not only the Mediterranean landscape but also the world. In the end, it can be said that the Atlantropa Project was nothing more than a crazy plan proposed at a time of volatility and instability in Europe, to solve the many problems which plagued the continent for decades and required much more focused solutions than a dam.

Since these problems have been left behind, colonial attitudes have been replaced with cooperation and innovations have occurred, which has left the Atlantropa Project in the past as a relic of its time and the question, “What if?”



 

Bibliography


Fourtané S (2018), “Atlantropa: Herman Sörgel’s vision of a new continent”, Available at: https://interestingengineering.com/atlantropa-herman-sorgels-vision-of-a-new-continent (Accessed 5th April 202)


Gall A (2001), “Das Atlantropa Projekt- Die Geschichte einer gescheiterten Vision: Herman Sörgel und die Absenkung des Mittlemeers”, Technology and Culture, Vol. 42 (3), p. 596-598


Jacobs F (2010), “Damming the Mediterranean: the Atlantropa Project”, Available at: https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/287-dam-you-mediterranean-the-atlantropa-project (Accessed 4th April 2021)


Lehmann PN (2016), “Infinite power to change the world: Hydroelectricity and engineered climate change in the Atlantropa Project”, The American Historical Review, Vol. 121 (1), p. 70-100


Lionello P, Abrantes F, Congedi L, Dulac F, Gacic M, Gomis D, Goodess C, Hoff H, Kuteil H, Luterbacher J, Planton S, Reale M, Schroder K, Struglia MV, Toreti A, Tsimplis M, Ulbrich U, Xoplakia E (2012), “Introduction: Mediterranean Climate- Background Information”, The Climate of the Mediterranean Region, p. xxxv- xc


Marshall M (2015), “World Changing”, New Scientist, Vol. 225 (3002), p.34-37


Mauch F (2012), “Atlantropa- Endless Energy from the Mediterranean Sea”, Arcadia, Available at: http://www.environmentandsociety.org/arcadia/atlantropa-endless-energy-mediterranean-sea (Accessed 4th April 2021)


Nicklas (n.d), “The one place in Europe where you can see Africa”, Available at: https://www.mapthememories.com/the-one-place-in-europe-where-you-can-see-africa/ (Accessed 8th April 2021)


Nunez C (2019), “Hydropower, explained”, National Geographic, Available at: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/hydropower (Accessed 2nd April 2021)


Scott T (2016), “The bizarre plan to drain the Mediterranean: Atlantropa”, [Online Video], Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEdsQmjLMKs (Accessed 8th April 2021)


Temin P (2016), “Great Depression”, Banking Crises, p. 144-145


Vidal R (2014), “Atlantropa- One of the missed opportunities of the future”, Alternative worlds, Peter Lang Publishing, Bern


Vidal R (2015), “Atlantropa: the colossal 1920s plan to dam the Mediterranean and create a supercontinent”, The Conversation, Available at: https://theconversation.com/atlantropa-the-colossal-1920s-plan-to-dam-the-mediterranean-and-create-a-supercontinent-47370 (Accessed 2nd April 2021)

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